Application Testing with Capybara

I know actually know very little about Ruby on Rails, since most of my time on web frameworks is spent in the Java world – and even then, I don’t do much interactive web apps. Mostly web APIs. APIs are so much easier to test.

Interactive web apps for humans are harder to test. This is where Capybara comes in, along with its collaborators Cucumber for the test description, and the integrations with Rack and Selenium WebDriver for the web testing backend.

While I know Selenium since it can be used for different target web platforms, I know less about Rack and Rails infrastructure. Fortunately, the book explains enough about these pieces for a relative newbie, and walks through worked examples that are more complete than the tools’ web documentation.

While Application Testing with Capybara is short, it goes straight to the point into what someone would need to know about the topic. Those with more time could rely on the free documentation.